Tagged With anniversary

Harry Potter turned 20 yesterday. (Technically, because of how the publishing world works, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone turns 20 next year, on September 1, when the US version came out.) Pottermania is so well-entrenched that all you need to see is a red and gold scarf to instantly know a lot about the person wearing it. Hogwarts is the preeminent fictional school.

The phrase "Special Editions" is one of the scariest things in all of Star Wars. No one can forget the way, 20 years ago this month, George Lucas updated his iconic films with new effects, sounds and scenes, then basically tried to erase the original versions from existence.

In 1991, Steven Spielberg told us what happened when Peter Pan grew up. The film, Hook, was a big hit and garnered a huge legion of fans who saw it as kids. It hasn't aged too well, to be honest, but these photos will make you either insanely nostalgic or incredibly depressed.

Google Earth turns 10 today, and to celebrate, the engineering team added 1500 new images to its great Earth View project, where it collects the most compelling images recorded by its source satellites.

The iPad just turned five. That's five years of reading emails at breakfast on slabs of glass and aluminium. Five years of wondering what the hell we were thinking when we first heard about this subtly transformative device. Five years!

On the 20th of December, 1939, the second laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was founded. The facility at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, California, would later be known as NASA's Ames Research Center after the founding chairman of NACA, Joseph S. Ames -- but no one could foresee how iconic Ames would become.

Image Cache: NASA has revealed spectacular, newly reprocessed images of four of the most amazing supernovas ever captured by a human science instrument -- the Crab Nebula (top), Tycho, G292.0+1.8, and 3C58 -- to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Chandra observatory. I decided to go one step further and collect them all.

The Rubik's cube is 40 years old today. It's one of the most popular toys in the history of mankind, one that has obsessed kids and adults alike, making them compete to be the fastest and do the weirdest things with it. Here are a few examples.

Buckle that nostalgia-seatbelt: Weezer's debut, The Blue Album, came out 20 years ago today. And in the two decades since, being geeky has gone from socially crippling to almost cool. Listening back through this album, it's easy to understand why Weezer boomed when they did. The songs are so damned catchy and energetic, you can't help but air-guitar along. There's genuine earnestness here that must've been an absolute breath of fresh air compared to the grunge everyone else was trying to make at the time.

Computer coding ability has gotten especially hip recently. People who can't code revere it as 21st century sorcery, while those who do it professionally are often driven to fits by it. It was 50 years ago today two Dartmouth professors debuted a coding language designed to be easy enough for anyone to use. The language that made that all possible. They called it the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code -- BASIC.

Today is the anniversary of brave Felix Baumgartner's space jump. His heart was racing at 185 beats per minute when he jumped from an altitude of 127,852 feet, then started to spin at 60 revolutions per minute and kept spinning for 13 seconds after jumping, reaching a maximum vertical speed of Mach 1.25. An incredible feat.

I really enjoyed LOST, despite how it ended and what everyone said. I have tried to get people into it after the fact, but six seasons of a show is a pretty daunting investment. Here's a Vine explaining the show in six seconds.

For better or worse, Apple has been peddling digital wares for 10 years through its iTunes store. What started as a 99-cent, iPod-centric music seller has evolved into the billion-dollar behemoth we know today.

A few of these Lego brick riddles can be easily solved. The rest? Not so much. In fact, some of them are really hard -- but definitely doable. They just require a little bit of imagination. Give them a try and post your answers in the comments.

Try and tally up all the text messages you have ever sent in your life. Every single one. From the very first time you recharged your Nokia 3315 with credit, to the terrible way you broke up with your high-school sweetheart, right through to the one you sent this afternoon telling that gambling site to stop spamming you. Those three messages count towards the total of eight trillion text messages sent every year, and today is the anniversary of the very first. So what did it say?

This is unforgivable. With all the hoopla about yesterday's crazy supersonic space jump, we didn't celebrate yesterday's 65th anniversary of the first man to go faster than the speed of sound, a true American hero: the now retired Brigadier General Chuck Yeager.

30 years ago today, workers in a factory outside of Hanover, Germany played host to executives from Polygram, Sony and Philips. These executives were here to see something they knew was going to be special. After a while, they were handed a small, circular disc. These executives were holding the first Compact Disc ever pressed. 30 years have passed since that day, and now, on the technology's 30th birthday, we take a look back at how it became one of the world's most popular formats.

It's been 30 years since the world's most loveable extra-terrestrial made his debut on the silver screen, and to celebrate the anniversary the film is being released on Blu-ray with what has to be some of the most over-the-top and brilliant re-packaging ever.

The Next Web notes that October marks the fortieth anniversary of the first sent e-mail. Obvious jokes about how long it was before the first spam email was sent aside, October's a momentous month for those of us who use email. These days, that's all of us.

Wikipedia turned 10 years old today and to celebrate the wonderful crowdsourced, potluck of information, here's a look at their awkward (and sometimes, wild) past. Their first six weeks of existence, all 10,000 entries, are logged right here.